by John Rechy
“You said you tried to be a homosexual.”
He lay back down next to me, head to feet. “I even tried drag.”
I laughed, deliberate laughter, loud laughter.
He winced and I tried to compensate: “Trying to picture you in drag—” It was difficult: the defined muscles, his handsome angular face, his masculine manners, his arrogant stride—in drag? “Jesus, Paul, you must have looked ridiculous.”
It worked. He laughed, too. “I did look awful, like a man in drag! It was in Paris; I went to a party. Genet was there. He was in drag, too, and he looked like the tough convict he had been—in drag. Someone asked if we were lesbian twins.”
I didn’t have to force laughter now; it came easily.
“He is a superb writer.” Even now, he startled me with his abrupt shifts. “The life he lived, the life he describes—masquerading, living at the edge of despair and danger, in prison for years—”
Even now, a tinge of his sarcasm aimed at my own brief incarceration; and he went on:
“—and exhilaration, danger, a courtship with evil, courting evil, that’s living, the life I admire, accepting it all, welcoming it all, a part of it all—”
Courting evil…. “In drag?” I tried clumsily to break a new tension aggravated by his words.
“High drag,” he said, shifting again. “Dress, high heels, stockings, everything, like the queen in your story, Miss—”
“—Destiny.” Miss Destiny, the defiant queen in my story, Miss Destiny, who swore to storm heaven and protest, to confront and judge God. In drag.
Paul’s face shone with sweat. “I wanted to feel entirely like a woman, to feel the goddamned power of a woman, to understand why I was bound to them, needed them—wanted to release myself—”
I was welcoming the promiscuous rambling—it kept me from understanding what I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand, his casual admiration of evil, a word that lingered in my mind unwanted, floating at the top of his rush of words in this room saturated with sweat, which, evaporating, gave to our bare flesh a welcome coolness.
“But it didn’t work, man,” he said. “That night, in drag, I fucked two whores, pulling out of one, entering the other, fucking each, back to front to back—and then I began tearing the drag I had kept on, the delicate things, tearing them strip by strip, peeling them away, the women’s things as if it was those that bound me.” He burst into mean laughter, harsh, rough laughter. “Stripping away those fucken clothes, their clothes, their power, I ordered the sluts to blow me one after the other until I shoved one away, and I kept one to take it all, swallow my cock to my balls, and I pushed her head till my cock was all the way down her fucken throat, and I wanted to feel all sensation gathering there, for me, in me, in my cock, my cock pulsing in her throat, and I forced her head to stay there—deep in her fucken throat, feeling it all, all of it, feeling my cock, man, pulsing, alive, man, my cock, me—until she choked, still I kept her there, shooting spurts of cum into her throat, every drop of my fucken cum in her fucken cunt-mouth.”
He lay back, exhausted, next to me. We lay silent, both of us, as if trapped within the frozen heat.
He stood up, staring down at me. His shorts were soaked with sweat, pasted against his groin. He looked naked, the saturated cloth outlining his aroused cock, pushing at the thin white tissue of the shorts.
I looked away from him, looked down at my own body, the sheet matted under me with sweat, my own cock outlined within my shorts, and straining.
After a time whose length I couldn’t determine, Paul walked out.
23
When we faced each other, the morning after the sweaty night—which had yielded to a warm coolness this morning—what would either of us say? Would we try to avoid each other? Was there need for embarrassment? It had been the graphic eroticism of his narrative—it was that which had threatened to arouse us both.
Still in bed, I could hear the sounds of Stanty in the water. I got up and looked out the window and saw him bobbing up and down, splashing. With him was Paul, just as exuberant. That meant Sonya would be alone.
Shifting my sight, I saw her through the window. She was walking slowly along the edge of the lake. Her head was lifted slightly back, slightly defiant, I thought.
I put on my pants over my bathing trunks. I hurried to the front of the house. Through the wide window in the living room, I located her as she wound about the lake. Her filmy azure caftan wrapped itself about her body as she walked, and then it drifted away, a misty veil. From this distance, she looked like a specter, pensive, or lost. No longer defiant—sad.
I walked out, hurrying to catch up with her on the lawn.
She turned around. “John!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to interrupt your walk.” I pretended to be moving away, hoping she would respond as she did:
“My darling John, you are not intruding. Join me.” Smiling her entrancing smile, she put her arm through mine. A feeling of warmth coursed through me—no, not the heat already conquering the day, the warmth of her flesh.
We walked along the path, silently, until she said:
“I think Paul is going to leave me.”
“Sonya.” I uttered her name softly, an assurance of trust for whatever she might say. “Why do you think that?”
She looked away from me, as if what she wanted to say might embarrass her. “Paul has always been very—oh, sexual and demanding,” she continued. “He likes to ‘play games,’ as he says. I want to tell you, but—” A long pause, as if she was determining whether to go on.
I thought she might stop, and I believe I hoped so, not wanting to hear what I suspected might be coming.
She weighed her words: “Even when his games became—excessive—even then I knew I could control them, and he allowed that. But, recently, here on the island, the pretense of hostility—yes, that’s it—the pretense seems, but only at times, only at times, it seems to be turning real. As if—what?—as if it angers him to desire me, but he does desire me.” She added emphatically, “I don’t doubt that.”
I was sure she would not go on. Instead, as if she had gathered all her determination to speak, she rushed her words: “At times now it’s as if he wants to devour me, not stop, to the point of hurting me, frightening me. At times it’s as if he wants to become me, banish me so that he can feel twice, what he feels, himself, what I feel—and then what only he feels, needs, wants—and not stopping, not stopping.”
What she had been saying—as she slid sideways seeking the edge of a shadow and closer to me as we lay on the lawn, under a fresh shadow, the way Stanty had seen us that earlier time, and I hoped he would see us again—about his need for women, his detestation of that need—it confirmed what he had said to me. I had continued to harbor the possibility that she might be an exception. As I voiced the words, I heard their inadequacy: “But the way he kisses you, in front of everyone”—in front of me, drawing her to him, pushing his body against hers as if there, then, he would take her; but all that affirmed what she had said. I had wanted only to assuage her feelings of abandonment. “And he—”
“As a lover—strictly as a lover,” she emphasized, “he remains … sensational.”
“—calls you ‘beauty.’” I was fumbling.
She threw her head back with a laugh. “‘Beauty!’ He began calling me that soon after we met—because he couldn’t remember my name.” Her laughter almost drowned her words: “After the summer, he’s going back to Paris. Always before, he’s told me where we’re going, even seeming to consult with me. Not now, not this time. Just that he’s going. Shall we sit here?” she said after we stood up to avoid the encroaching sun and were passing a bench under the spill of a large shadow. The sun had gained heat, negating the coolish moment, and it had begun to erase the shadow we had found.
WHWACKK!
A shot rang out in the distance.
WHWACKK! WHWACKK! Another, another.
I stood up, looking in the direction of
the deserted island.
Sonya had remained calm. “It’s Paul and Stanty,” she said, raising a hand to me to rejoin her on the bench. “He’s showing him how to shoot because I wouldn’t do it.”
“Is the gun available to him?”
“Paul keeps it locked up,” she assured me.
Still nervous at the violent intrusion of gunshots, I sat down close to her, listening to the fading sounds of the fired gun until they died.
“If Paul does attempt to discard me,” she rushed her words, “I would—” Her face twisted in anger.
Would she say what I thought was forming in her mind?—an intimation of violence aroused by the sound of the fired gun? This extremity of angered love, from this woman whose serenity I had come to admire, and whom, yes, I was coming to love—yes, possibly to love—was it possible that she was capable of what I was sure she had been about to confess?
I would—?
We remained for a longer time under the cooling clutch of low branches we had moved to, away from the pursuit of the sun.
“Island! Island!”
It was Stanty’s voice.
“They’re celebrating with their intimate signal,” Sonya said, then: “Stanty’s a sad child.”
“I haven’t seen that,” I said. “He seems overly confident.” Yet there had been that haunting moment when he had whispered into the void of the lake:
I wish …
“He’s frightened—and confused.”
The moment seemed right to ask: “Is Corina Stanty’s mother?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure Stanty knows either.”
“How the hell is that possible?” Incomprehensible even for what was unwinding on this island.
“He refers to each by her name—the rare times when he mentions them—often with hatred, at times gasped with what might be longing. He seems so unsettled each time that occurs that I have never questioned him. I asked Paul, only once; and he was furious, demanding that I never bring that up—my ‘filthy curiosity,’ he dismissed it.”
“Impossible,” I whispered, more to myself. Like the heat rising after deceptive moments of cloudy respite, the ambiguity about Stanty’s mother added to the tension that the island itself seemed to conspire to sustain.
“Would you like to have sex with Paul?”
I looked away from her to dismiss her question.
“Would you have sex with me?” she said.
I stared at her beside me, her startling beauty, Paul’s mistress. A fleeting image: the body of the man who had lain beside me that sweaty night, him—that supremely confident and arrogant man—and she, Sonya, their naked bodies entangled … Compete? Affront him? Would I? Sonya as a prize? No, not her, not Sonya, no. Confused, I blurred my answer: “If so, what would Paul—?”
“Paul?” she said as if the name conjured an enigma, and she glided past her question: “Once he demanded I go out with him, wearing a sheer dress, nothing under it, and beautiful shoes he chose for me, and dazzling earrings. He took me to a famous restaurant where he was greeted like a king. He told me he wanted to remain aroused throughout. Paul. His games.”
24
I ran into Paul at the top of the stairs leaving the library and heading to the sundeck.
“Join me, man.”
I should not have feared any tension from the intimate night. It was as if it had not happened.
On the sundeck, he went to the bar to fix what would become standard sunning drinks: Cuba libres, ice jiggling in the glasses, frosting them, a sliver of lime perching on each rim. We sat at the bar, under the shade of the canopy, our legs touching, retreating, pressed against each other’s, warm, moist, heated by the sun, darkened brown.
Immediately he launched into a tirade, periodically pausing to savor the cold drink, clinking the ice as if in accompaniment to his racing monologue, and quickly moving on, an entangled web of ideas, abruptly taking form. Curt dismissal of writers he didn’t admire—including some I had mentioned favorably—followed by breathless homages to those he approved of, and arrogant declamations about how I must expand my influences beyond American writers; declamations and denunciations of psychoanalysts, whom he loathed: “They destroy all that might be beautiful—blurring with platitudes the essential considerations of the enigma of evil,” that word “evil” recurring as if floating unattached in his mind, seeking a definite context, then abandoned, just a word. “Evil.” Although I often disagreed with his conclusions and deductions, I seldom interjected my contradictions, fascinated by the jumble of ideas, questions, and suppositions. Increasingly he returned to this: his interrogation about my “sexual life on the streets.” Yet, often, he interrupted himself to launch into one of his long declamations of his beliefs—random at times, illogical, at times contradictory, at times brilliant, at times incomprehensible. Even when he asked a question, he might tumble over an attempted answer himself and resume his litany. He seemed to become high on the flow of his own words, and then he would return to this:
“When you were in what you call a sexual arena—and I like that, man, a battle, a war—when you were in it, how many sexual conquests did you achieve? How many, in one day?” He was speaking fast, as if to gauge it all quickly. “Did you set a goal, for a record?—or did it just compound like in your geometric equation that finally coils about itself, or is it the algebraic one? How many conquests in one day, man, in the arena?”
“Thirty, in one day.”
“Ah.”
In my early teens I had worked as a copyboy with the city newspaper. The number 30 was penciled at the bottom of a news story to indicate the end. In Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a huge park in the heart of the city, a park famous as a “sexual playground” where men gathered for sex along long trails, miles of roads for driving from one place of encounter to another, sex everywhere, in pairs or orgiastic groups, in that park, one day, I set my goal at thirty; but when that was achieved, it was not enough; I needed more victories, more conquests, more “numbers.”
“You came thirty times?” he asked me, sipping from the rum drink.
I laughed. “I don’t think even you could come thirty times, man. I didn’t come at all, just moved from one person to another, being desired, counting.”
“You didn’t respond? Never reciprocated? You were trade.”
I wasn’t surprised he knew the word “trade.” He was seeking—demanding—indifference, and it had been there in my experiences.
“You never desired the other, right?”
“If I did, I pretended not to, in order to retain my pose of indifference. It was a pose I cultivated.”
“Desire depletes—even showing it depletes? Yes! Nothing is more weakening than to desire; yes, I see that, man, I see. All that mattered was your needs, only yours.”
As it had been for him, that night with the two women—was he making that connection?
The heat had abated as we sat on the deck drinking chilled wine Paul had opened during dinner. We had left the sundeck and had shifted from the Cuba libres to the white wine he had chosen. Sonya had been unusually restless, perhaps because, earlier, when she had found me and Paul on the sundeck in deep conversation, she had felt left out when Paul went silent.
“I’m going swimming,” she had said after dinner.
“This late, Sonya?” I asked, concerned.
“Yes.”
“And during those compounded encounters, you felt …?” Paul proceeded.
“Alive while it was all happening—” I started.
“The rush of conquest,” he interrupted, “the exhilarating humiliation of the conquered. Desire drains the power to humiliate.”
“—and I felt dead when it was over,” I finished over his words.
“Alive—dead?” He seemed to be deducing something relevant to himself.
“And sad,” I added.
“Sad!” He turned sideways, as if dismissing the compromising word.
“Yes, feeling at times that
I had been cruel—”
“Cruel!”
“Yes, cruel in intimate encounters, from one to another, my partners forgotten, encounters in which I was the only one desired, leaving the other feeling … erased.” Like him, yes; was he listening? The verbalizing of my feelings surprised me. I had not felt that during the sexhunt; those feelings had emerged only now, belated feelings, but I didn’t tell Paul that.
“But, man, before you had sex, did you convey your terms?”
“Yes.” I knew what was coming, which is what he said:
“Willing victims, man, willing victims,” he drew his desired connection.
This was not the time to reject his disturbing deduction; there was more to explore of myself. “Why does all this fascinate you?” I asked him.
He leaned toward me, to add emphasis: “Parallels. Parallels between us, between our lives! Yours and mine. We’re two of a kind, man,” he said.
Whatever else I might feel for him, I did not admire his life, through which coursed a vein of meanness, of unmitigated selfishness, and cruelty. Had such a vein coursed through my own life? I had to reject it. “I don’t think so, Paul, I don’t think we’re two of a kind.”
“Oh, no?” His words, his smile—a startling assumption of knowledgeability about me, his bold stare at me, held along with the goddamned smile—made me turn away.
And then, in a wave of anger, what should have occurred to me much earlier (the answer to the question that I had asked myself over and over about his motivation for inviting me here)—even as I supplied answers that I swept away—was this: He had invited me here, fired up by my narratives of excess—the orgiastic profusion of Mardi Gras amid laughing demonic angels, fleeting intimate connections, indifferent excess—and he, Paul, was fired up too by my accounts of vagrant sexual interludes in downtown Los Angeles in the arena of doomed exiles on the very edge with nothing to lose, rage to exist—asserting from all that the parallels he had drawn (I turned to face him)—and believing that through kindred knowledge, as he saw it, I would set down the facts of his sordid life, connected to my own, juxtaposed—”two of a kind”—much of his life already delivered to me in “chapters,” to be transcribed and reimagined (“by a young writer, his first book”); and along the way—this frightened me—as he explored his life, and as I set it down in intimate detail, I would discover mine, more vividly recalled than when it had occurred, coldly, indifferently, uncaring, cruel—cruel like a sudden memory among others.